The Morning After

Filmmaker Finn NĂžrgaard: He went to a debate on freedom of expression, and Islam's contribution to the debate was to kill him.

The dead of Valentine's Day in Copenhagen have now been named:

Dan Uzan was a 37-year-old Jew - sorry, I mean "member of the random community" - and he died outside the synagogue serving as a "security guard" for a Bat Mitzvah.

That's part of the problem - long before anybody starts killing the security guards. In Europe in the 21st century, a young girl's Bat Mitzvah can only take place behind a security perimeter. What a sewer the EU elites have made of their Eutopia. The state church - the Church of Denmark - does not require security guards, nor elsewhere on the Continent do Catholic churches. But Jewish religious and social life in Copenhagen and across Europe is now possible only behind a barrier of security. Laura Rosen Cohen has a useful round-up of those foot-of-page-17 news stories that chart, remorselessly, the social disintegration of Denmark - from the security perimeter, to the advice to Jews not to wear identifying marks of their faith when they leave the house, to the exclusion of Jewish children from public schools.

As to the "randomness" of the attack, there are only a few thousand Jews remaining in Denmark, and therefore not a lot of Bat Mitzvahs. I am disinclined to believe the killer just got lucky. As with the attack on the free-speech event, he knew exactly where he was going.

As Laura says, "What starts with Jews never ends with Jews." Many Europeans dislike Jews, and many others are indifferent to their fate. But it helps to keep a sense of self-interest about these things: The man who killed that Jew wants to kill you, too.

The first victim yesterday was Finn NĂžrgaard, a 55-year-old film maker attending the conference on "Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression". Mr NĂžrgaard directed the 2004 documentary Boomerang Boy, produced the 2008 film LĂȘ LĂȘ, and occasionally appeared in front of the camera, too. It will be interesting to see whether the self-pampering A-listers of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists will managee to squeeze in a mention of him at this month's Oscars during the teary montage of deceased artists. A decade ago the Academy couldn't find room, amidst George Clooney et al congratulating themselves on their "courage" for making the umpteenth dreary film on McCarthyism, to namecheck Theo van Gogh, who was pumped full of bullets, semi-decapitated and had a gloating note from his killer pinned through his chest by a dagger - all because he made a film. Messrs van Gogh and NĂžrgaard weren't blacklisted, they weren't reduced to working under a pseudonym or (horrors!) in television. They died for their art. George Clooney was happy enough to latch on to the #JeSuisCharlie shtick at the Golden Globes. If he means it, he'll ensure poor Finn NĂžrgaard gets a nod in among the orgy of backslapping at the end of this month.

Mr NĂžrgaard's film LĂȘ LĂȘ is the tale of four siblings who fled Vietnam and wound up running one of the most successful restaurant businesses in Scandinavia. One assumes that's the sort of thing David Cameron had in mind when he issued the following response to the slaughter in Copenhagen:

Denmark and Britain are both successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracies and we must never allow those values to be damaged by acts of violence like this.

That's the usual Cameronian bollocks. As recently as the late Eighties, over 90 per cent of Danes were (albeit highly residual) members of the Church of Denmark, so it wasn't that "multi-faith". In reality, for almost their entire history, both Denmark and Britain were mostly ethnically homogeneous societies that admitted small numbers of immigrants who generally assimiliated and sometimes, as in LĂȘ LĂȘ, distinguished themselves. And then, a generation or so back, the Cameronian elites in Britain and on the Continent committed themselves to a process of mass, transformative immigration on a scale unknown to any society in human history outside of conquest. "Multiculturalism" is a Trojan horse Europe gave itself in an act of moral vanity, and waiting inside was Islam.

We don't know the motive for the attacks but we know that there are forces that want to harm Denmark, that want to crush our freedom of expression, our belief in liberty.

Hmm. "Forces that want to harm Denmark", huh? Any chance of pinning it down a little? It's not much of a "freedom of expression" or a "belief in liberty" that can't even talk honestly about its enemies, is it?

I would like to ask Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what's their happy ending here? What's their roadmap for fewer "acts of violence" in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish "Troubles" "an acceptable level of violence"? In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it's all entirely "random", as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it's tough if it's your kid, but that's just the way it is. If we're being honest here, isn't that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don't worry, we'll do our best to contain it - and you can help mitigate it by not going to "controversial" art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or...

I said above that waiting inside multiculturalism's Trojan horse was Islam. Not "Islamism", or "radical Islam", or "extremist Islam", or "violent extremism" or "extremist radicalism" or "radicalist violentism" or anything else: just Islam. As I wrote yesterday:

This is usually the point at which we're expected to do the not-all-Muslims-want-to-shoot-you-dead shtick. And that's true. But Islam itself has no feeling whatsoever for the spirit of free speech.

The more Islamic a society gets, the less free speech it has - the less intellectual inquiry, artistic achievement, contrarian spirit. Most western Muslims are not willing themselves to open fire on synagogues or Lars Vilks, but they help maintain the shriveled definition of acceptable expression that helps license the fanatics of Copenhagen and Paris. Muslims in Europe, North America and Australia will pay lip service to "free speech", and then promptly re-define it as excluding speech that "blasphemes" or "insults" their faith - which is to say them. Which is to say the great vulgar, brawling, free-for-all of free societies does not apply to them. So, when, say, France's Muslim population reaches 20 per cent, you will need to have the support of three-quarters of the remaining 80 per cent to maintain even a bare popular majority in favor of free speech.

Is that likely? Or will there be more and more non-Muslims like the wretched quisling Welsh bishop, the Right Reverend Gregory Cameron, frantically arguing that if you hadn't been so "offensive" you wouldn't have caught their eye? Islam and free speech are, as His Miserable Grace implicitly recognizes, incompatible. And ultimately, therefore, you have to choose between liberty and mass Muslim immigration.

The reaction of David Cameron and Helle Thorning-Schmidt suggests they have made their choice. I think, somewhere deep down, they know it's a recipe for slow societal suicide. And I wonder if, even deeper down, they also know that it won't be that slow.

~For my immediate reaction to the attack on the Lars Vilks event, see here.